The biggest voice in radio, Rush Limbaugh, is dead. In a coincidence of chance, he died a dozen years, almost to the day, after the death of the man he replaced as the biggest voice in radio. That biggest voice was Paul Harvey.
There were similarities between the two. Both were conservative. Both were peerless opinion shapers. Both mastered the microphone like none other. But the differences were bigger. Limbaugh put a divisive and detestable imprint on the medium. Harvey’s imprint was diplomatic, and decorous.
I saw it firsthand, because for a couple of years at the start of my career, I was Paul Harvey’s editor. My job was mainly to keep him honest: to make sure that from the reams of wire copy from AP, UPI, and Reuters through which he pored every day in that age before the internet, he accurately reflected the facts of each story he wrote.
Note the words, “He wrote.” People used to ask me if I wrote what Paul Harvey spoke. My joking response was that I only wrote his pauses (he was famous for his pregnant pauses). But the fact is, for the two national broadcasts we produced every day from Chicago— a five-minute show at 7:30 in the morning and a 15-minute show at 10:30— he wrote every word. That might not sound like rocket science but it is a lot of writing, particularly when the quality of the writing, the clarity of the language, the impact of the story, must be high.
His was. One of the things I admired about Paul Harvey’s communication skills was his ability to take some macro-concept and boil it down to each microcosm, which means, each of us. For example, if he was talking about the latest figures for the Gross Domestic Product, he wouldn’t say it like everyone else would: “According to a Commerce Department report, the GDP is one trillion dollars.” No, he’d more likely simplify it down to something like, “The government says that last year, each of us, every man, woman, and child in this nation, produced four thousand dollars worth of goods.”
An even better example is about Harvey’s singular and resourceful approach to storytelling. There was a story one day about a guy who built some kind of goofy gizmo and tried to fly. Paul’s piece went something like this: “Joe Smith (of Someplace USA) thought if he built big wings out of stiff fabric and strapped them to his body and jumped from a cliff, he could fly… (pregnant pause)… Joe Smith was 42.” Who needs more?!
My days with Paul Harvey were pre-computer. What that means is, everything was pounded out on a typewriter. You older readers will remember carbon paper (you older readers will remember a typewriter!). Paul would put two sheets of newsprint together with carbon paper in between, then write a line or two, then pull the sheets out from the typewriter carriage and remove the carbon paper and place the written pages into two piles— one for him, one for me. So if the story read, “An airplane crashed today in Pittsburgh. At least 40 people died,” those would be the words typed out on the page.
The thing is, if he wanted to add a new line to the story— maybe something like, “The pilot survived and investigators already are talking to him in the hospital”— rather than retype the whole report on a new set of carbons so it would all be on one page, he’d insert two new sheets with carbon in between and type out the new line about the pilot who survived, in effect adding a second page to the story. The result? The story could end up being only six or seven sentences long, but typed on four or five different pages, then sorted in the right order to be delivered in its proper sequence on the air.
Once it was showtime, Paul went into the studio and sat before a very big table surface, laying out his pages in about a dozen different piles that would permit him to deliver his stories in the most spontaneously entertaining, rather than the most momentously logical, order. Since he was a master at judging how something sounded to the listener’s ear, sometimes he’d mix things up midway through the broadcast…. which brings me back to his piles.
While Paul was on the air, my job was to diligently watch the wires and if there was a breaking story that was either new or somehow affected what Paul already had written, I had to write it up (yes, I did get to write a few things like that, in his voice) and rush it into his studio and put it right in front of his face, usually to take precedence over any other pile still before him.
That all went well until one day when some huge story broke and in my haste to get the new page in front of Paul, my hand accidentally swept several piles off the table and onto the floor. For any other broadcaster that would have been a disaster. But not for Paul Harvey. Between the odd and random order of stories he chose, and the pregnant pauses for which he was so well known, the audience never knew the difference. He kept reading, I knelt and found coherent pages and handed them up to him, then he kept reading, then from the floor I kept handing him more. That broadcast was as good as any other.
Here’s something else that serves as a tribute to the man. He always had some commentary in his 15-minute broadcast, and eventually when he trusted me enough, he’d ask my opinion of what he’d written. Of course I was just a rookie in the business and was afraid at first to be blunt (I mean, the guy not only was the biggest voice in radio but he was as old as my own father), but he inferred that and told me not to worry, to tell him what I thought. So I did. Sometimes he’d hear me out, then gently explain that he respected my point of view but didn’t agree— Paul was an old-fashioned conservative and I sure wasn’t— but sometimes, to this man’s enormous credit, he’d listen to what I thought, and actually change what he wrote.
The best example? A simple one, and not at all political. There were two different stories on the wire services one day. One story said, the height of miniskirts was going up (meaning, skirts were getting shorter). The other said, the rate of rapes was going up. The stories weren’t connected, but Paul decided they must be and wrote a commentary that dealt with a growing sense of decadence in our country and attributed the rise in the rape rate to the rise in the height of the miniskirt. I didn’t even have to lay out a line of logic to him; I just told him I thought that was absurd. He kind of laughed, said I was probably right, and changed it.
A more cogent combination of Paul Harvey’s open mind and his brilliant use of language is from the day he turned on Richard Nixon. It was some time into the Watergate scandal, when the president who Paul had so admired was still trying to hold on. He began his commentary with these words: “Mr. Nixon, I love you… but you’re wrong.” If that didn’t say it all, nothing did.
Paul kept a rigorous schedule. If I didn’t get to the office in Chicago by 4:30 in the morning, he’d beat me there. The difference is, when my “shift” was over, I was done. But Paul, one or two days a week, would finish the second broadcast, then leave the office and head for the airport and fly somewhere to make a well-paid dinner-hour speech before some large group, then he’d get back on a plane for home and be at his desk the next morning at 4:30.
One day at the end of the second show, he had his coat and hat on and was on his way out the door, carrying the briefcase he only took on his travels, but he looked particularly tired and I asked him why he pushed himself that way. It couldn’t be for the money; he already was the best paid broadcaster in radio. And it wasn’t for the frequent flyer miles; they didn’t have those back then. His answer was something like this: “When you walk into a banquet hall full of people who rise and applaud when you’re introduced, it’s hard to give that up.” He was, among other things, honest.
When Rush Limbaugh died this week, there were millions who wept, but millions more who at least silently thought if not publicly proclaimed, “Good riddance.” Not so for Paul Harvey. He had a way of reaching across divides. Not every day, not on every issue. But he was a good guy who respected what other people thought and, without being insulting or myopic, let his audience know what he thought. In the wake of Limbaugh I can only say, what a concept.
Harvey helped shape what you hear today. Not the bad parts. The good ones.
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on BoomerCafe.com.
What a wonderful memoir Greg. Reminds me of running scripts for Dallas Townsend and Walter Cronkite, crusty writers to the end.
Greg,
As a former radio news writer and presenter (who was hardly worthy to even LISTEN to Mr. Harvey), I really enjoyed this column. I can hear him in my mind, signing on and signing off. He was an inspiration to all of us in Mass Comm schools. Thanks, Greg for reminding us of one of the really great ones!